I understand your perspective, but the catalyst of everything mentioned is the jail. The reason the area surrounding the JAGS is so depressed is because it's separated from the DT.
I'm only coming at this from the perspective of downtown revitalization. Not investing to fill gaps between downtown and other neighborhoods (yes, the Sports District is a completely different neighborhood historically).
You can literally go in any direction.. Southbank, towards Springfield, Brooklyn, LaVilla.. all of those area's have had or are vibrant areas today in comparison to that long stretch of land near the jail. Goto any other city with a DT sports complex, I guarantee you won't find any environment like JAX. It's truly one of a kind.
It is truly one of a kind. I can't think of many urban sports districts with so much surface parking and underutilized vacant lots. However, there's a reason for this. We ripped apart redlined urban neighborhood to create it. Over time, we need to infill what was destroyed. As we infill, there are things we can apply from cities as small as Green Bay, to those as large as San Francisco. Infill of so much moonscape won't happen overnight. We should definitely support it but ensure that it does not become the primary focus of downtown revitalization, at the expense of revitalization of the actual downtown core itself.
There is literally a three block by five block area of emptiness. The Southbank being nice, Brooklyn being nice today, are not random and happened because there was enough of a buffer from a jail to stir investment.
Any idea why infill development continues to sprout up around Broward County Jail? It has great waterfront frontage along the New River, there's a nice urban Publix across the street and its neighbors are some of the tallest luxury condos and apartment towers built in a Florida CBD (excluding Downtown Miami).
Now back to East Bay Street. Of course there is a stretch of emptiness. We had shipyard that consumed that entire stretch since the civil war. We also took out a few blocks of warehouses to build the jail. Thank god for Maxwell House still surviving, paying good wages and contributing to the tax base (and we have people who want that gone for condos, lol). We should not overlook and excuse our mistakes by blaming the jail's location. COJ has owned the shipyards for 20 years and done nothing with it. Its okay to admit that we have pooped the bed with tax money on East Bay Street. We'll be better off moving forward by learning from our mistakes.
All the big residential buildings on the Southbank are less than 20-25 years old. There should be no reason (other than the jail) for the Southbank being valued 50% more than the Northbank today.
This ignores the legacy of redlining on the Northbank, the presence of San Marco and the fact that East Bay Street has historically been an industrial district. It also ignores the reality that the Broward County Jail has not stopped development in Fort Lauderdale. I'm not claiming the Duval County Jail is the Taj Mahal, but it isn't the reason Jacksonville has struggled to revitalize downtown. Urban history, development and redevelopment is way more complex than a single issue or site.
In standard DT's, the "central core" is the most expensive real estate in town. No fortune 500 business is setting up shop next to a jail in Jacksonville. No developer is building condos, or apartments near a jail in Jacksonville. You can see this exact trend all up & down the east coast. Baltimore has great articles on how much sheer opportunity has been wasted. The same is true here. It is decades long. It's so deep that other issues have become seemingly the "issue" when the "issue" is the lack of local interest & outside investment. But of course, not in the Southbank or Brooklyn or even in the main central core area, only in this subregion of DT. Everywhere else seems to have activity & redevelopment, except near the Jail. The Jail has city-funded projects and 5-10 year long RFP's in the hopes something changes. Because, "the numbers don't work."
Developers are building condo towers across the street from the Broward County Jail. However, I don't understand why the jail is such of a focus. The actual downtown core could use a large infusion of public dollars. From the Landing's grave and James Weldon Johnson Park to the Laura Trio and activating vacant properties and storefronts. If we have $400 to $700 million in public money to invest, dumping that type of capital into the actual core would completely turn it around in less than five years.
Relating an infrastructure project to this is a little cheese but nonetheless I would also say a functional transit system would likely have a larger impact than removing the jail. But, we don't have a functional transit system & we have a flawed plan. So it's hard to say that it would actually be better in its current form.
Planning downtown revitalization around moving the jail is just as flawed as JTA's U2C plan.
Why did they need to remove that ramp? I can flip the question right back. Other cities have overpass ramps in urban areas with plenty of vibrancy to come with it. Could it be due to the jail being right there? I'd also argue the "crime" with the landing probably had something to do with a jail being 3 blocks away.
How does this theory hold up with the Broward County Jail in the heart of Downtown Ft. Lauderdale?
At the end of the day, companies & firms are not willing to take the risk in this large swath of DT. This isn't a question, it's a fact by what exists there now.
Why is the jail the focus? Perhaps that $400 million to move the jail would be better off spent being divided up to assist multiple deals in the core of downtown.
